Artist Therese Ritchie speaking at the opening, with
Dr John Ah Kit, who opened the exhibition

By Leanne Coleman

More than 1000 people have flocked to a landmark retrospective art exhibition at the Charles Darwin University Art Gallery since it opened as part of the 2010 Darwin Festival.

CDU Art Collection and Art Gallery Curator, Anita Angel said that more than 350 people attended the launch of the exhibition Not Dead Yet last month, which continues to receive about 40 to 50 visitors each day.

“Due to unprecedented public demand, the exhibition dates and CDU Art Gallery visitation hours have been extended,” Ms Angel said.

Not Dead Yet featured a survey of 160 art works by Darwin-based artists Therese Ritchie and Chips Mackinolty.

“Arriving in the Northern Territory in the early 1980s, Ritchie and Mackinolty were pioneers of ‘alternative’ printmaking in the region, creating powerful and persuasive graphic art of protest, propaganda and people’s politics,” she said.

Ms Angel said Not Dead Yet highlighted the best of a collaborative and creative partnership by two Territory-inspired, contemporary Australian artists.

“This exhibition provides a rare opportunity to see a comprehensive range of screenprints, posters, drawings, photographs, digital collage works and limited edition fine art prints and paintings, dating from 1969 through to the present day.

“For more than three decades, working ‘together, sideways and apart’,” they have captured the lives, landscapes and major events that have defined the Northern Territory both as ‘home’ and as an enduring Australian frontier.”

This has been the artists’ first major combined exhibition at a public gallery in Australia, and the first focus survey of prints, posters and photographs in this category mounted in the Northern Territory.

Not Dead Yet will run until 30 September 2010. CDU Art Gallery visitation hours have been extended from Monday to Friday, 10am to 4pm, or by appointment with the Curator.